Friday, September 15, 2017

Trump's push to arm Ukraine puts already exposed and vulnerable civilian population at risk, could spark wider war. Kiev, not Moscow, is widely seen responsible for latest fighting in eastern Ukraine-James Carden, The Nation...(With Trump, convicted felon Soros gets the answer to his dreams: forcing US taxpayers to weaponize Ukraine, incite war with Russia, and generally increase human misery)

The National Security Task Force of the Friends of Ukraine Network, a
bipartisan coalition of former government officials, including former
NATO supreme allied commanders Philip Breedlove and Wesley Clark, have called for
the Trump administration to send tanks and drones to Ukraine,in order
to, in the words of one member, “increase the pressure on Russia to
negotiate seriously on implementing the Minsk agreements.”

Yet, in one of his rare departures from what he derisively called
the US foreign-policy establishment “blob,” President Obama resolutely
refused to send “defensive” weapons to Kiev, though he did sign on to
the creation of multinational military training base in western Ukraine
at Yaroviv. (In this context it is worth noting that the 2015
Brookings-Atlantic Council plan to arm Ukraine was opposed by, among others, Brookings Russia scholar Fiona Hill, who now serves as Trump’s lead Russia adviser on the NSC.)

Then as now, arguments for arming Ukraine are based on disingenuous interpretations of past agreements and an equally reckless disregard for the present circumstances.

Of last week’s proposal by Russia to send UN peacekeepers to patrol the front line, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said
that “this offer of a UN mission in eastern Ukraine shows that Russia
has effected a change in its policies that we should not gamble away.”

Yet sending arms might incentivize escalation on the part of both
parties to the conflict. Last week, at the BRICS summit in China,
Russia’s Vladimir Putin warned that “The delivery of weapons to a conflict zone doesn’t help peacekeeping efforts, but only worsens the situation.”

But Trump’s envoy Volker dismissed such concerns in an interview
with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in July, saying, “I hear these
arguments that it’s somehow provocative to Russia or that it’s going to
embolden Ukraine to attack. These are just flat-out wrong.”

We also might pause to recall what happened in Syria, where the
weapons provided to the anti-Assad rebels by the CIA and Pentagon ended
up in the hands of radical jihadis.

In the case of Ukraine, the weapons could quite conceivably fall into
the hands of armed militias like the far-right Azov battalion.

“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,” the head of the battalion Andriy Biletsky has written,
“is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their
survival.” It is, said Biletsky, “a crusade against the Semite-led
Untermenschen.” One Azov battalion member told Sky News that “To become
an Azov fighter you have to be a proper white man.”

Nevertheless, in recent months Azov has been the subject of fawning documentaries by news outlets such as Vice, Newsweek, and the The New York Times, which have downplayed its neo-Nazi ideology.

That aside, the enthusiasm for sending weapons remains
undiminishedin some quarters. Former US ambassador to Ukraine John
Herbst has dismissed the concerns of those whom he dismisses as
“armchair strategists” who argue against sending weapons because “Moscow
has a greater interest in Ukraine than Washington [does], and Ukraine’s
government is corrupt and undeserving of such support.” According to
Herbst, “The most cost-efficient way to counter the Kremlin’s
revisionist policies is to increase the cost of its aggression in
Ukraine.”

Herbst also argues that “United States made a commitment to
guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity when it gave
up its nuclear weapons in 1994. Providing defensive weapons to Ukraine
will honor that commitment and raise the cost of the war for Moscow.”

Not everyone agrees. Former State Department officials Jeremy Shapiro and Samuel Charap have written
that, actually, “There is no such obligation in the Budapest
Memorandum.” They point out that “Strobe Talbott who led the
negotiations on the memorandum, said at the time: ‘This [memorandum]
does not mean the U.S. is willing to come to the defense of Ukraine if
it is attacked militarily’ (Agence France Presse, November 18, 1994).
Any side offer of such a commitmentmade to the Ukrainians by U.S.
diplomats and not notified to Congress has no standing.”

An American humanitarian-aid worker in Donbass recently asked,
“[I]f this move instead triggers escalation and subjects Donbass
civilians to a new round of death and misery, will proponents still be
paying attention?” In the end, sending weapons would be a destabilizing
move that would further jeopardize Minsk II, put an already exposed and
vulnerable civilian population at risk, and could spark a wider war. As
such, Trump would in this instance be wise to follow the example set by
his predecessor."